Cell No.1 is one of six structures modelled on human dimensions that Absalon designed for various major cities around the world. He intended to inhabit these cells himself, maintaining a consistent lifestyle within a nomadic existence…

The Israeli artist Absalon, who died in 1993 at the age of 28, produced an oeuvre of extraordinary complexity and unusual uniformity during his short life. Now for the first time, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art will show an extensive solo exhibition of works by this impressive artist. In his pieces, Absalon created spaces in a systematic manner, using unconventional arrangements and principles of selection and classification which challenge traditional concepts of use and function. In his words, “nothing forces us to make a chair look like a chair.”

Absalon engages himself with spaces in systematic and successive ways. By taking questions around essential human activities and basic forms such as the rectangular, the square, the triangle and the circle as his starting points, he begins by emtpying out the encountered spaces before restructuring and refilling them with the help of simple forms…